WD 4TB Black WD4001FAEX Review

Western Digital have been at the forefront of storage solutions for a solid number of years, and it’s their commitment to research and development that has enabled them to keep this position. The company has been vehemently pushing their “Power of Choice” message, which gives consumers the choice between WD’s color-coded drives to pick the HDD that matches the situation, be it for simple desktop storage, backup, or as a reliable addition to a NAS. This week I got my hands on the WD 4TB Black 4001FAEX drive, a monster of a drive that’s designed to meet the needs of gaming enthusiasts, high performance desktop systems, and workstations.

Features

The WD Black hard drives boast a 7200 RPM spin speed, 64 MB cache, dual stage actuator technology, SATA 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) interface, and an integrated dual processor to deliver breakneck performance. It also features a number of WD technologies such as StableTrac to minimize noise and vibration, as well as “NoTouch” ramp technology which again ensures that your drives last for much longer due to reduced wear and tear.

The WD 4TB Black also makes its debut as WD’s largest drive for the consumer range. On par with performance, the only other drive in their lineup that would match the 4TB Black is the 10,000rpm WD VelociRaptor, which although offers incredible speed, it caps at only 1TB. So for anyone looking to get as much storage as possible on their desktop or workstation environment, the 4TB Black drive is a shoo-in.

To test out the read/write on the WD 4TB Black, I ran CrystalDiskMark, which tested the drive across various scenarios for both read and writes to the disk. The results were quite impressive for a consumer-targeted drive, with the drive managing to copy a 2.1GB file across in about 12 seconds (from an SSD). The results when compared to a competitor’s 4TB hard drive are marginally better, but benchmarks alone might not be alone to sway you to buy this drive just yet.

Conclusion

So what makes the WD 4TB Black worth your attention? Well when you take into account the 5 year warranty that bundles with this drive, it quickly becomes clear that for the price you’re paying, you get a drive that’s going to serve you well for a much longer time. Its low price factor also means that companies can use the drive to quickly add storage space to their infrastructure, as long as the drives aren’t being used for backup or NAS (which WD has specific drives for). But that aside, if you’re looking for a durable hard drive that packs a whopping amount of storage, with a comfortable price tag, then the WD 4TB Black drive is for you.

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